In Central Market in Dallas, TX

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Strongly featured in this set are 2 stray dogs which befriended us upon our arrival in Quintay, and then followed, entertained, and protected us for the next several hours, until we got on the bus to go home.

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Upon closer inspection, we discover that the cleavage was photoshopped onto the wrong model– the little girl instead of the mother.

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However, this Lady of Justice is different– she took her blindfold off, and doesn’t seem to have much interest in her scales.

The statue is decades old, maybe as much as a century. I’ve heard several vague stories about why the statue is like this– a bitter gift, from either a neighboring country or a former wealthy criminal– or the artist commissioned to make the statue was frustrated with not getting paid, so made the statue as such.

None of the stories explain why in the world the city would allow such a statue to be installed in front of their courthouse.

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In particular, there are many applications available for the iPhone which will calculate the tip you need to leave at a restaurant.

There were 27 when I counted a month ago. And there are more being introduced every day.

I want to develop a free iPhone application that will inform its user of the current running total number of tip-calculator iPhone applications.

I want to raise $1000 for this, which will go to the iPhone app developer (not me). You can help me by donating as little as $10 here. It’s on a site called Fundable, where I don’t get any money (and you don’t have to pay your donation) until the entire $1000 is raised. If the $1000 isn’t raised within 26 days, then nobody pays.

I need this application. You need this application. The iPhone community needs this application.

For the price of 3 lattes, you can help make this dream a reality, for all of us.

Donate today.

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Here is our current ad:

As St. Paul desends into a police state [see here and here] while the civil-liberties-hating republicans have their convention there, wouldn’t it be oh-so-appropriate to air these commercials in the St. Paul market during prime time television? That is exactly what we are doing. Right now we have funded the commercial to run 8 times.

You can view all 3 ads here.

You can use the widget there to pay to put them on the air, although unfortunately, the minimum order is $100 (even though there are many slots that are less than that — so in that case you have to buy multiple slots).

But even if you can’t fund an advert, be sure to show them to your friends!

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Something cool and unique that HuffPo has is their bloggers. Unlike a typical paper or online publication which has 5-20 columnists, or a big community website like TPM or DK where anyone can sign up, Huffington Post is unique in that they hand-pick their columnists (bloggers), but there are a lot of them. So you have this pool of something like 1000 interesting people from various disciplines, blogging freely in one place.

However, their publishing system has a big problem: there is no per-author RSS or Atom feed! There is only a feed for ALL bloggers. If you like a particular author, the only way to follow their work is to sign up for email updates.

There is a way to work around this using filters on your news reader. Here is how to do that with NetNewWire.

First, you have to subscribe to the big feed of all bloggers (from here on known as The Big Feed). I put this in a folder called “filtered”, so I’ll remind myself to never “mark all as read” in that folder. (As you can see, Salon editorials have this same no-per-author-feed problem.)

Next, click the “gear” at the bottom of your feed list, and create a new Smart List. We are going to configure it with two criteria.

1. The feed that the post must be from. This is a little unintuitive — it refers to any other feed that you are following — this is why we had to first subscribe to The Big Feed up above. To be clear: if you are not following the feed in this field elsewhere, then NNW will not pull down those posts. I’m kind of stating the obvious here, but this is something that bugs me about NNW — I wish there was a way to create a filtered feed all in one place, instead of forcing all the logic into a meta Smart List. Although to be fair, the Smart Lists are actually quite handy and full-featured. But come on man, it’s 2008, do I really need to be blogging about meta work-arounds like this? Okay, moving on…
2. The “creator” (author) of the blog post. I use “contains” instead of “is” just in case the author changes the presentation of their name — adds a middle initial, “Dr.”, et cetera.

Here’s how it should look (using the brilliant and hilarious Chris Kelley as an example). Note that the field for the feed is too short to show anything past the http://, and that it’s impossible to make that window bigger to compensate for this problem. 2008, people!

That’s it! You can treat the Smart List exactly like a regular feed. The only thing you have to watch out for, is to not mark any posts as read in your “filtered” folder (unless all your Smart Lists don’t have any unread posts).

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I’ve written to them asking for the reason, I’ll post on this blog when I get a response.

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The City of New Orleans Will Never Be the Same - audio - 5:48 - aac

Read on for more background…

During the Hurricane Katrina disaster in 2005, there was a TV special featuring many entertainment stars, to raise money for the victims of the hurricane. One of the stars on the show was rapper Kanye West. When it was his turn to speak on the show, he abandoned the script provided to him, and delivered an emotional and angry message about how poorly black victims in New Orleans were being represented in the news media, and how insufficient the federal response to the tragedy was (see video below).

Houston Hip Hop group K-Otix, infuriated by the tragedy happening in neighboring New Orleans (many refugees were displaced to Houston), and inspired by West’s bold statement, released a song, George Bush Doesn’t Care About Black People, which sampled heavily from Kanye West’s Gold Digger (a hit on the radio at the time).

Below you will find the media I used in the edit, and some other media that I thought was important and was worth collecting and archiving.

Media used in the edit

• George Bush Doesn’t Care About Black People - audio - 8.7 MB - 3:47- mp3
  

  The original K-Otix single.

• Interview with New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin - audio - 8.1 MB - 11:13 - mp3
  

  This interview is amazing. Probably the most honest and emotional interview you will ever see from a major US politician. Ray Nagin is frustrated as hell with the lack of federal response, and he doesn’t mince his words. I could describe it here more, but it is truly required listening for anyone interested in the topic.

• Tucker Carlson interviews Bill Maher - video - 13.1 MB - 7:21 - mov
  

  Kind of annoying “left vs. right” theater, but hey, Bill Maher is pretty much correct about everything he says here. Covers lots of ground, and shows the absurdity of the messages from republicans at the time.

• Michael Brown on Nightline - video - 9.1 MB - 8:11 - mov
  

  Lots of great moments here. Ted Koppel acts like a real journalist and lets Brown know that he’s a pathetic little man.

• Barbara Bush tours the astrodome - audio - 0.2 MB - 0:08 - aac
  

  Short and sweet. Wow, what a bitch.

Other media

• Kanye West on the Katrina relief TV special - video - mov - 2 MB - 1:39

  The action that started it all. Powerful, brave, emotional, hilarious, awkward. A great moment on TV. Look at Myers trying to play it normal, and then Chris Tucker’s confused face when they cut to him early.

• Several Fox News commentators acting like human beings - video - 9.6 MB - 8:27 - mov
  

  This clip is powerful and fascinating in so many ways. Geraldo Rivera and Shep Smith report the facts from the ground in New Orleans. These Fox News jackasses are usually paid to go to work every day so they can look you in the eye and tell you that black is white. But faced with the situation in New Orleans, they can’t bring themselves to say rosy patriotic things about the government. Witness these plastic soulless creatures go into shock when surrounded by starving babies and rotting bloated corpses.

• George Bush assures New Orleans that everything will be okay, swarm of jowly white guys nod and clap - video - 0.5 MB - 0:18 - mov
  

  I have to admit, even after all these years, I still kind of buy that he believes half the shit he says.

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• radiant-exception-notification-extension

  Email notification and managed error templates for Radiant and other extensions

• radiant-sphinx-search-extension

  Adds Thinking Sphinx support to Radiant pages

Check them out (amazingly, no pun intended) here:

http://github.com/digitalpulp

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The American Civil Liberties Union filed suit Thursday over a controversial wiretapping law, challenging the constitutionality of the expanded spy powers Congress granted to the president on Wednesday.

The ACLU consistently takes on Big Important cases that make a difference to our liberties in this country. If you don’t regularly give them money, I strongly urge you to start doing so. Consider giving $10 a month with the “guardian” option. This isn’t some random charity that helps people, animals, etc.– this is one of the most important organizations in the US, working every day to maintain a free society.

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